My small change had a big impact

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Welcome to 2021. Long break from writing this newsletter! But let's get back into it like we never left.

Today I'm going to talk about some client work I did in December. I wrote some social media ads that helped them cut their cost of acquisition in half.

That's a bit jargonny, I know. In other words, the ads I wrote were twice as successful as the ads they were running previously. Twice as many people signed up to the software we were promoting after they read my ad, which meant the amount of money they spent on each new customer was cut in half.

I was naturally pretty happy with this, so I thought I'd tell you about it.

Social media ads

A Canadian firm called 42 Agency hired me to write Facebook ads for their client, Uptick. Uptick is software that helps managers have more constructive 1:1 meetings with their subordinates. It stores records of conversations, action points and soforth all in one place.

But the real killer feature is a bunch of pre-loaded constructive questions that help turn the 1:1 meetings into more meaningful conversations.When their sales team demonstrates the product, that's always the feature that grabs peoples' attention and gets them excited about using the app.

So with that in mind, here's a before and after. I wrote the one on the right, (or on the bottom if you're reading this on your phone). It’s the one with the picture of the woman looking at her laptop.

At first glance, these aren't that different. They both focus on that one main feature I mentioned above.

But there's a critical difference: the first one talks about the feature exclusively, while the second one leads in with a sentence about a wider problem.

This is an example of using your audience's stage of awareness in your copywriting. Stage of awareness is a way of categorising your audience. I usually divide people into one of three groups:

1) People who aren't aware of the problem you solve.

2) People who are aware of the problem, and are comparing different solutions.

3) People who have decided to use your category of product as their solution, and are comparing you against your competitors.

Applying stage of awareness to social media ads

Sponsored posts are essentially an interruption. Someone browsing their Facebook feed is unlikely to be looking for software to manage their 1:1 meetings. They're looking at what their friends are up to, checking out what's happening in the groups they're in - stuff like that.

So I made the assumption that most people were in the second stage of awareness - they were aware of the problem, but hadn't (in that moment) settled on software as a solution to it. What's more, they weren't really thinking about 1:1 meetings in that moment.

That's why I led with "remote 1:1's don't have to be awkward." That summarises the wider problem before getting to the killer feature. On its own, the feature has very little context; it's not clear why a manager should care about it. So unless they're actively looking at different kinds of meeting management software - which they aren't, because they're on Facebook - they're not going to care about a feature in isolation.

The sentence about awkward 1:1s focuses their attention on the problem. It gives them a reason to care about the killer feature, which solves that problem.

It's a small change. The rest of the ad is basically the same. But it had a huge impact - like I said, Uptick's cost of acquisition halved when we started running this ad.

Granted, some of that is probably attributable to the new image. As you can see, the ad on the right has an image of a person while the ad on the left has a stylised graph But the copy had a lot to do with it as well, even though the change I made was pretty small.

So in your own copy, think about the stage of awareness. What stage is your audience in? Is your copy communicating to people in that stage? If not, what small changes can you make to better-connect with your readers?

Let me know how you get on.

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